#FORMATION: BLM SUMMER 2016

Black Lives Matter Syllabus is the intellectual property of instructor Frank Leon Roberts. This means that material compiled in this syllabus should not be duplicated without proper citation and attribution. Duplicating this syllabus verbatim or nearly-verbatim (i.e. its description, subject headings, weekly topics, or configuration of reading material) without proper attribution is an act of intellectual dishonestly.

If you are planning on adopting this syllabus for a course of your own:
1. Be sure to include the following disclaimer statement at the top of your syllabus: “This syllabus is an adoption of the course, “Black Lives Matter” designed by Frank Leon Roberts (frankroberts@nyu.edu) at BlackLivesMatterSyllabus.com.”
2. At the top of each of the pages in the syllabus, include the link: BlackLivesMatterSyllabus.com.
3. Send a courtesy email to frankroberts@nyu.edu, notifying us of your intention to adopt this syllabus.

University instructors who attempt to adopt this course without proper attribution should expect to be contacted and reported to their Provost and/or the Department Chair at their home institution.

#SLAY:

Approaching The Black Lives Matter Movement

New York University

Summer Session II, July 5-August 11TH

Professor Frank Roberts

Tues & Thurs: 5:30-8:30PM

Course Hashtag: #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus

From the killings of teenagers Michael Brown and Vonderrick Myers in Ferguson, Missouri; to the suspicious death of activist Sandra Bland in Waller Texas; to the choke-hold death of Eric Garner in New York, to the killing of 17 year old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and 7 year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit, Michigan—-#blacklivesmatter has emerged in recent years as a movement committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies.

This intensive interdisciplinary seminar links the #blacklivesmatter” movement to four broader phenomena: 1) the rise of the U.S. prison industrial complex and its relationship to the increasing militarization of inner city communities 2) the role of the media industry in influencing national conversations about race and racism and 3) the state of racial justice activism in the context of a neoliberal Obama Presidency and 4) the increasingly populist nature of decentralized protest movements in the contemporary United States. In this course we will be mindful of an important distinction between #blacklivesmatter (as an emergent movement that has come into existence within roughly the past three years) vs. a much older and broader U.S. movement for black lives that has been in existence for several centuries (which can be traced back to at least the first slave uprisings in the antebellum south). Part of our goal then, we be to think about how the former has been influenced by the latter and to what ends. Among the many topics of discussion that we will debate and engage this semester will include: the moral ethics of black rage and riotous forms of protest; violent vs. nonviolent civil disobedience; the hyberbolic media myth of “black on black” crime; coalitional politics and the black feminist and LGBTQ underpinnings of the #blacklivesmatter movement; the similarities and differences between the blacklivesmatter movement and the U.S. civil rights movement; and the dynamics of political protest among the millennial and post-millennial generations.

Required Textbooks:

Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor, From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness